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At this point, I had a couple of options. I could spend more money on a better, faster NAS, one that wouldn’t disappoint me with its performance. Or… I could go ahead and build my own, which would give me the flexibility to build basically whatever box I wanted. Inspired by our recent articles on building a living room gaming PC and a DIY router, I decided to take the more Ars option.

Backblaze is back with a new version of their Storage Pod. The major change is that they got rid of their port multiplier backplanes, and instead are going with drives directly attached to two expensive 40-port SATA cards.

The port multipliers have always been a negative aspect of their build to me, as I can see them causing problems, slowing down performance, and being difficult to integrate into a standard PC case. Their replacement is two $700 40-port SATA cards. The downside to these is price, and while I’d love to have one of these cards in my 20-drive file server, it’s out of my budget.

For the first time since the original Storage Pod, Backblaze is announcing a completely redesigned approach with the introduction of the first “direct wire” Storage Pod. This new Storage Pod performs four times faster, is simpler to assemble, and delivers our lowest cost per gigabyte of data storage yet. And, once again, it’s open source.

The BitTorrent Blog describes how to get BitTorrent Sync running on FreeNAS.

So you’ve upgraded to a new computer. Congratulations. Now you have to decide what to do with that old computer. Give it to your parents? Reenact your favorite scene from Office Space? How about you turn that piece of junk into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running BitTorrent Sync. It may not play Crysis, but it will provide you with a plethora of options including FTP, redundant storage, and most importantly, BitTorrent Sync.

One of its more frustrating aspects is its lack of an officially supported server component—Apple seems stubbornly unwilling to provide a real iTunes server, and so folks who would otherwise happily centrally locate a media library on a perfectly suitable NAS are stuck with islands of music.

Linux Journal builds a low power NAS with an Arm-based server and USB hard drives.

As an experiment, and finally to get rid of that large, inefficient and ugly tower case, I decided to use the new Trim-Slice as the base for an ultra-low-power, ultra-small replacement file server. The Trim-Slice is built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, and the specific model I purchased features a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 32GB SATA SSD.

What is FreeNAS you say? Put simply, its is an operating system based on FreeBSD that brings with it a snazzy web interface for management, and all the protocols you need to share files between Windows, Mac and Linux. In other words, a perfect solution for your digital bookshelf. Lets get to it.

This post will explain how to set up a NAS server with Debian running essential services such as ssh, samba, nfs, cups, rdiff-backup and rtorrent with a web interface; and using two HDDs in RAID 1 mode with everything encrypted. It took me awhile to research all bits and pieces, hopefully it will save you time if you are going to do a similar set up.

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.